YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Anthropic reveals $900B AI spending commitments ahead of IPO

64 points zomtorg 2 hours ago 38 comments

fraywing 1 hour ago | parent

Anyone have a non paywall link?

ex1fm3ta 1 hour ago | parent

ohh boy, guess who's gonna pay for all of this ? Retail investors of course. VCs want to get out quickly hence the crazy valuation, institutionnal investors are already heavily positionned on this through energy, semiconductors and cloud actors ..

baron3dl 1 hour ago | parent

i'm pretty sure the plan is for labor to pay for it, by giving up their pay, involuntarily.

mikeocool 1 hour ago | parent

Going to be hard for companies to pay for inference if consumers don't have any money to buy their products.

SaintForthigan 33 minutes ago | parent

Like all other problems of the future, this too can simply be solved by throwing more AI at it. The next great work of the frontier labs must not merely be to replace human labor, but also human consumption. With the ouroboros so complete, all such petty human economic concerns will cease to have relevance, as we all cleanly divide out of the equation at last.

jeroenhd 25 minutes ago | parent

That didn't stop any of the previous financial bubbles, financial crises, and progress-induced suffering.

If you make it through the devastation, you'll be one of the richest and most important people in the world. If not, throw a random frontman in front of the wolves and disappear into the background.

yfw 1 hour ago | parent

I dont want to be a bag holder, but the indices seem to be being gamed to get retail investors involved

freecodeio 41 minutes ago | parent

makes me wonder if these retail investors are noticing how everyone keeps mentioning them about holding the bag

altcognito 1 hour ago | parent

How much to power those data centers? It's kind of meaningless if you can't power them.

actionfromafar 1 hour ago | parent

You can just stop using electricity. Have you tried living in a tent? But seriously, rising prices is the solution.

robot_jesus 51 minutes ago | parent

I think that’s OP’s exact point. It’s not just the capital costs of the build out but the operations costs of running them that can be hard to predict.

ChrisArchitect 1 hour ago | parent

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50337439

NickNaraghi 1 hour ago | parent

Pretty insane that sama's $7T target in 2024 wasn't that far off... https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sam-altman-seeks-trillions-of-do...

simonw 1 hour ago | parent

The commitments are over 19 years, but they expect to spend half of that, $447.5bn, by the end of 2030 - so about $105bn per year for the first few years.

Their 2026 revenue looks like it will be ~$67bn so clearly they're anticipating continued significant revenue growth for this to make sense.

hackcasual 1 hour ago | parent

So basically it works out if they become a Microsoft level company

JacobAsmuth 1 hour ago | parent

It works out if they can keep up basically one more quarter of their previous growth rate and then plateau for the rest of time.

simonw 54 minutes ago | parent

The challenge there is competition. If other providers can match or beat their model quality at a lower cost that revenue could dry up pretty quickly.

Or as Anthropic put it on page 42 of their S-1: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2130357/000162828026...

> If we are unable to differentiate our models, platform, and applications from competing offerings through enhanced functionality, superior performance, better safety features and reliability, lower cost, or other factors, demand for our models, platform, and applications may decline. The rapid pace of technological change in AI means that models, platforms, and applications can quickly become outdated. We must continuously invest in research and development to maintain our competitive position, but there is no guarantee that our investments will result in models, platforms, and applications that customers prefer over competing alternatives.

baq 52 minutes ago | parent

You mean East India Company

PowerElectronix 1 hour ago | parent

If you are going bankrupt, you may as well go bankrupt spectacularly.

summermusic 34 minutes ago | parent

Or if you know a bailout is coming, might as well go full steam ahead

0cf8612b2e1e 32 minutes ago | parent

The George Costanza approach to bankrupting a business.

Aurornis 1 hour ago | parent

> The filing directly discloses for the first time that Anthropic has agreed $895.4bn in purchase commitments and lease agreements for computing power and infrastructure, of which $447.5bn is expected to be incurred before the end of 2030.

So $448 billion committed, with unclear cancellation terms, through the next ~48 months.

Clearly this will be rising over time, but even a naive division results in $10bn per month of compute spending.

That honestly doesn't seem so bad relative to some of the claims I've seen? Their Q3 revenue is about $5.6bn per month and it's rising. They have so much money in the bank waiting to be deployed that they get a billion dollars of interest per year. Investors are desperate to put more money into the company.

They spend a lot on compute, but rolling it up into cumulative spend numbers makes it sound scarier.

christophilus 33 minutes ago | parent

If I’m mathing right, your own numbers suggest they’re spending nearly double their quarterly revenue, every month. That sounds far from reasonable to me.

zipy124 26 minutes ago | parent

They gave revenue for quarter per month, not per quarter.

digitaltrees 1 hour ago | parent

$900b contract spending / $30b = 30 years of revenue.

That’s wild. They have committed to absolutely insane growth with no margin for error.

gizmodo59 42 minutes ago | parent

their this year projection at a minimum is above 60B? and its not going to be the same every year.. so not sure how 30 years of revenue is your estimate.

TYPE_FASTER 42 minutes ago | parent

And half of it will happen by the end of 2030. I don't know finance well enough to conjecture that these purchases and lease agreements via equity, but maybe that's their plan to reduce the hit. Or, if they will trade tokens for goods and services as part of these agreements. No clue if that is something they could do.

It just seems like, given what we know about how things have worked so far in the AI space, that paying for the entirety of these agreements is not likely.

ActionHank 27 minutes ago | parent

And also, because no one seems to see it, negative profit for the foreseeable future whilst competitors have locked in "good enough" and a fraction of the price.

ares623 20 minutes ago | parent

Hey they're just like me and my mortgage! And I consider myself very high AAA investment grade.

sunir 56 minutes ago | parent

I'd also like to reveal a Chapter 11 restructuring of Anthropic in 2029 to cancel these contracts.

I mean, I can't reveal that because I'm just some schmuck. But I'd like to.

cmiles8 36 minutes ago | parent

If they slowdown just a bit more (and growth just slowed) they’re bankrupt.

If they grow like no startup in history they just eek by and manage to barely pay their bills. Impressive, but not worth anything close to $1T plus valuation.

If they achieve AGI money becomes worthless.

So where’s the upside for investors here?

infamouscow 30 minutes ago | parent

It makes more sense if you view themselves collectively as Claude, and their IPO is a prompt that ends with "make no mistakes."

sonicvroooom 26 minutes ago | parent

I'm gonna be straight here: wahahahahah.

$900B ???? With a UI that's basically made to either make or keep people retarded? A company that reads like it was written by some off-the-shelve-low-effort pre-patch-Hi-I'm-Devon in Silicon?

What the fuck is wrong with people on the Roadblock-Street? Are you that fucking retarded? It's 20 fucking 27 ... An LLM that can USEANDNOMORE github and READANDNOMORE data bases??? HOOOOOLY FUCKING SHIT CORONA MUST have hit your billionaire brains hard, man ... fuuuuuuck

etempleton 26 minutes ago | parent

Zero percent chance they can grow fast enough to meet their financial obligations without taking on some extremely expensive debt that will increase and compound their losses.

At this point I think the goal is:

Step 1: Go public

Step 2: Allow exit for early investors

Step 3: file bankruptcy

Step 4: Amazon or Google “rescues” the company at pennies on the already heavily diluted valuation

WheatMillington 16 minutes ago | parent

You genuinely think that the goal of this business is to go bankrupt and be sold for scrap?

etempleton 6 minutes ago | parent

I am being sardonic, but I honestly don’t see a path to profitability.

honeybadger1 15 minutes ago | parent

They will have to be bailed out. If they go public, leaders will take their money and run and everyone else will be buying up their parts.